Judges — who's who

The only female judge in the book, and the only one described as both prophet and judge in the strict sense. She sits under the palm tree of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim, and the Israelites come up to her for judgment. She summons Barak to attack Sisera, accompanies him to the battle when he refuses to go without her, and afterward composes the Song of chapter 5 — one of the oldest surviving Hebrew poems, possibly dating to the twelfth century BCE. Deborah is the high point of the book: a leader whose authority is religious, judicial, and military all at once, and the only judge whose victory is told twice, in both prose and poetry. The land has rest for forty years after her victory.

Of the tribe of Manasseh, the youngest in his father's house, found threshing wheat in a winepress to hide it from the Midianites when the angel of the Lord finds him. He breaks down his father's altar to Baal in the night, tests God twice with the fleece, and leads three hundred men with torches and clay jars against the camp of Midian at night — smashing the jars, blowing the trumpets, and routing an entire army. He refuses kingship in a famous speech but makes an ephod from the gold earrings of the spoil that the people end up worshipping, and his concubine's son Abimelech seizes a brutal brief kingship within a generation. The most ambivalent of the major judges.

A Gileadite, son of a prostitute, driven out by his half-brothers, who led a band of outlaws in the land of Tob before the elders of Gilead came and begged him to lead against the Ammonites. He bargains, accepts, and defeats them with great slaughter. He is also the man who made the vow that cost him his only child: whoever came out of his door to greet him on his return, he would offer as a burnt offering. His daughter came. He honoured the vow. He then killed forty-two thousand Ephraimites at the fords of the Jordan by means of the shibboleth password. He judged Israel six years and died.

Of the tribe of Dan, dedicated as a Nazirite from the womb after an annunciation to his barren mother — no razor, no wine, no contact with the dead. Endowed with extraordinary strength by the spirit of the Lord. He killed a lion with his bare hands, killed a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, and tore the gates of Gaza off their hinges in the morning. Betrayed by Delilah, who learned the secret of his Nazirite hair and shaved him in his sleep; captured, blinded, and set to grinding grain in a Gaza prison. His hair grew back. He prayed once, with genuine urgency, and pulled down the temple of Dagon on his own head and on three thousand Philistines. The most gifted judge and the most morally compromised.

The woman in whose tent Sisera, the defeated general, took refuge after the rout at the Kishon river. She offered him hospitality, gave him milk in a lordly bowl, covered him with a rug, and when he fell asleep from exhaustion took a tent peg in one hand and a hammer in the other and drove the peg through his temple into the ground. The Song of Deborah blesses her above all women in the tents, and names her act of killing in brutal poetic repetition: between her feet he sank, he fell, he lay still; between her feet he sank, he fell. She is not ambiguous in the text. Only later interpretation has made her so.

Son of Abinoam from Kedesh in Naphtali, the military commander whom Deborah summons to lead ten thousand men against Sisera. He agrees to go only if Deborah goes with him, which she accepts, but tells him the glory of the battle will therefore go to a woman. He leads the attack from Mount Tabor, routes Sisera's nine hundred iron chariots when the Kishon floods and the plain becomes mud, and pursues the fleeing army. He arrives at Jael's tent to find Sisera already dead. He is present in the Song of Deborah as a named partner of the victory, though Deborah and Jael take the poetic foreground.

Son of Gideon by a concubine in Shechem, whose name means "my father is king" — the name itself is the ambition. He hired seventy pieces of silver's worth of worthless fellows, returned to Shechem, and killed his seventy half-brothers on a single stone. He ruled as king over Israel for three years until a woman dropped a millstone on his head from a city wall at Thebez and he had his armour-bearer finish him off so no one could say a woman had killed him. His brief and bloody career is the book's first and bitterest meditation on what kingship without covenant would look like.

A woman from the valley of Sorek whom Samson loved. The Philistine lords offered her eleven hundred pieces of silver each to discover the secret of his strength. She asked him three times; he lied three times. The fourth time she pressed him until his soul was vexed to death — her persistence is rendered with a verbal precision that implies something more than bribery — and he told her about the Nazirite hair. She called a man to shave him while he slept on her knees. He woke to find the Lord had left him. The text gives no verdict on her that it does not give on Samson's own taste for Philistine women throughout his story; the betrayal is framed as the culmination of a pattern, not a surprise.

Unnamed, in the closing horror of the book. A Levite from the hill country of Ephraim takes her as a concubine. She leaves him and returns to her father's house in Bethlehem. He follows, brings her back, and on the return journey they stop for the night in the Benjaminite town of Gibeah. The men of the town surround the house and demand the Levite. He pushes the concubine out instead. They rape her through the night. She crawls back to the threshold at dawn and dies there. The Levite cuts her body into twelve pieces and sends one to each tribe of Israel. The civil war that follows nearly destroys the tribe of Benjamin. The book records every detail without softening, and she stands as one of the most damning witnesses in the Hebrew Bible against the society Judges shows Israel becoming when there is no king.

A man from the hill country of Ephraim who stole eleven hundred pieces of silver from his mother, confessed, gave it back, and from the returned silver had his mother make a carved image and a metal image for a household shrine. He installed one of his sons as priest, then hired a wandering Levite from Bethlehem to serve as his priest for ten pieces of silver and a suit of clothes a year. The men of Dan, looking for territory, came to his house and took the images and the Levite by force on their migration north. Micah ran after them and protested; they told him to be quiet or brave men would come upon him. He gave up and went home. His story opens the book's two appendices and shows the religious disorder that the absence of central authority has produced: private shrines, hired priests, and idols made from stolen silver.